


Someone Else's Memories

by DaisyNinjaGirl



Series: St Basil, the Fool for Christ [3]
Category: Captain America (2011), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Father issues, Gen, History!, Lots of Bad Science, Original Character(s), Reminiscing, Who doesn't want to hug Captain America?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-30
Updated: 2012-07-01
Packaged: 2017-11-08 20:53:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/447445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaisyNinjaGirl/pseuds/DaisyNinjaGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers has a gap in his memories.  Sometimes it takes a bit of help to fill it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Thimblerig](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Sleep of the Just](https://archiveofourown.org/works/420067) by [Thimblerig](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig). 



> This story picks up on a passing comment by Thimblerig that Peggy Carter went on to live a full and useful life and refused to be ‘that Peggy Carter who never got to dance with Captain America.’ This is set a few years after the events of the Avengers (2012) movie and assumes that the thing with the stuff with the spoiler worked out OK for everybody in the end.
> 
> (It's basically all written, will be updated over the next couple of days as the next couple of chapters are polished.)

Captain America is not used to wearing a suit.

The knitted cotton tights of his movie outfit, where baggy knees were the continuing despair of the wardrobe mistress, perhaps.  Military fatigues or his battered leather jacket, absolutely.  His new designed-to-look-old-fashioned-but-strategically-reinforced-with-spandex fighting gear... kinda, although he'd never had the nerve to tell his designed-to-look-old-fashioned handler that the lack of baggy knees made him feel a little homesick.  But this was the other kind of suit - the kind where you wore a tie, and there were tailors involved, and the design hadn't really changed since the days when he saw upper class men behave arrogantly in moving pictures that cost him a dime to get in to.  And there were things that came with wearing a suit, like being polite to boring people.  He’s been dragged along to a few of these things and told that they’re for ‘work’, but still, preening is an alien feeling.

Then Steve turns around and catches sight of a young woman he’s _pretty sure_ was just checking out his ass.  She has small high breasts and mahogany brown hair cut in soft waves around her face, and a discreet nose stud, which he’s _still_ not used to seeing on people.  She quirks her eyebrows at him unapologetically, raises her glass… and turns around and goes off to talk to someone else.   Her gown is showing a lot of back, and there’s warm soft skin stretched over smoothly defined muscle, and he likes that.  She has a very straightforward way of moving – not the opulent sway of the expensive women who slither up to him at parties like this one, nor the lithe ‘I could kill you with my left pinkie’ grace of his female co-workers.  He likes that, too.

“ _Strictly off-limits_ ,” a voice crackles in his earpiece.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mutters.

“ _Yeah, you do,_ ” Hawkeye goes on, “ _and you want to tell Coulson you’re making eyes at one of his daughters, that’s your own look out._ ”

“Coulson’s married?” he asks.

“ _Divorced_ ,” their blandly amiable handler comes on line.  “ _Perhaps we could keep the office gossip to when we’re off duty_ …?”

***

Amelia Coulson is not used to wearing a dress.

Miniskirts or jeans are more her style, or when the situation warrants, a lab coat, but just occasionally there are perks to her job, and getting to wear a dress and talk to posh people is one of them.

And she’s thinking: _Yes, I, Amelia Coulson, am in Naples, as an internationally renowned scientist (or supervised grad student of same) at a conference where they do black tie Meet & Greets_ and looking forward to some heavy duty rubbernecking wedged in between the Science, but then there's Steve Rogers and while she’s absolutely OK with _Hot Dang! He fills out a tuxedo nicely_ , a quiet treacherous part of her is channelling her Dad: _Well, I’ll be, Captain America!_   And then she sees Natasha Romanov glittering in a corner which must mean that, no, it’s not random chance that Captain America’s at her physics conference, that Coulson must be in a back room whispering in their ears, and she’s willing to pay money that he hasn’t called her Mom in the last six months.  _It figures_ , she thinks, and goes to check in on her supervisor.

She finds Professor Farley seated in a throne-like chair and letting slightly less eminent physicists pay her court: Amelia makes a point of fussing over her – drinks, a plate of choice nibbles, smiling and nodding at Farley’s friends and subtly letting them know that she was associated with the professor.  And why not?  If she was going to preen, she might as well make the most of it.

“My dear,” Prof Farley says, “would you do me a favour?”

***

Steve wanders through the crowd ‘making nice.’  “Can someone remind me what we’re looking for exactly?” he whispers into his mike. 

“ _Hinky stuff,”_ from Hawkeye.

“ _Signs of suspicious behaviour_ ,” from Coulson.  “ _The threat we’re responding to was on the vague side. Please be alert for activity that doesn’t fit the normal profile.”_

“ _Which means what, exactly?”_ from Bruce.

Coulson sighs.  “ _We look for ‘hinky’ stuff.”_

Steve turns – that girl is heading toward him.  This time, she decides to talk.

“Hi, I’m sorry, this is a bit awkward, and we’ve not actually met.”  She fidgets a little until he nods at her.  “Yeah, so… the thing is, a friend of mine is a huge fan of yours – I don’t suppose you’d mind being introduced for a couple of minutes?”

And he figures it’ll be some overly thin debutante or, maybe, given the tone of the evening, an earnest and bespectacled bluestocking and he’d have to be careful about hero worship.  Actually, it turns out to be the girl’s professor, and there’s a glint in the old woman’s eye that reminds him sharply of the maternal women he’d sorted scrap metal with during the War before he’d joined the army.  He wonders if, like them, she’s going to pinch his cheek and call him ‘adorable’.

The little old lady was ensconced in a huge chair, surrounded by earnest looking scientists.  When he approaches, she gives him a huge beaming smile: “Captain America!  I always wanted to meet you – I read all your serials when I was young, and your movies, of course...  Schnapps?”  And he flinches at the proffered shot glass because he’s suddenly having a vivid memory of Dr Erskine _not_ giving him schnapps and laughing about it.

He blinks a little and takes the glass.  “Thank you very much, uh…”

Miss Coulson whispers in his ear.  “Professor Farley.  Physics.  Presenting tomorrow.”

He sips the schnapps and goes on smoothly.  “… Professor.  I hope your presentation on…”

Agent Coulson: “ _N-dimensional imaging of the M1 nebula..._ ”

“… imaging goes well tomorrow.”

“Oh, I’m sure Amelia will do fine.”

“What?” The girl looks startled.

“Didn’t I tell you, dear?  I’m feeling a little wheezy.  Much better for you to present, and I’ll help you with the Q&A afterwards.”

The girl’s eyes bug out, and he thinks she’s about to explode.  Huh.  Anyway, he’s working tonight: “Professor Farley, Miss Coulson,” he nods at them both impersonally.  “Good luck then,” and slinks off to look for something ‘hinky’ before his cheeks could get molested.

***

It was her big opportunity, and Iron Man was ruining her presentation.  Well, OK then, _Anthony Stark_ , the surprise substitute keynote speaker was ruining her presentation.  Seriously, he was late, dishevelled, and bumping his way noisily through the seated audience on his way to the one vacant seat in the lecture theatre.

Wearing spectacles and pretending to be attentive once he'd finally sat down wasn't cutting it.

“…and so,” she moves on, “as you can see from the recorded test data, our calculations that the photonic distribution would form a characteristic peacock's eye diffusion weren’t entirely supported.  What we _did_ find was that-”

“Now hang on,” Stark interrupts.  “Surely the variance can be explained by the Liechmann Paradox – see here…” and he’s holding up a dirty scrap of paper with scribbles on it and starting to babble.

She directs her remarks vaguely to his section of the room.  “As the good Mr Stark would know if he’d taken the time to read our paper abstract - or arrive punctually - the effects of the Liechmann Paradox were accounted for in our experimental design.  If he’d care to review the first three pages of the handout, I’ll continue with our findings…”

She moves on to the image slides, a bloom of vivid colour: “What we found was that once we accounted for the discrepancy in observation points, we were able to tune our incoming data feed with a high degree of coherence and good correlation with control readings from the Hubble telescope.  Once we had that, we were able to ‘wind back the clock’ on our readings and get images from earlier in their life cycle.”  She set the animation going and let her audience watch the image of the Crab nebula slowly fold in on itself and the supernova dwindle.

“Holiday snapshots-” Stark interrupts.

“No.  I’m saying that all these packets of light that we get - they’re not _snapshots_.  They all carry the memory of what they’ve been.  Every photon knows that it used to be the heart of a galaxy, you just have to look at it the right way.  Look.  A thousand years ago, people _saw_ a ‘guest’ star when SN1054 went supernova…  We can see that again, now.  We can understand what _happened_ all that time ago.”  And then she falters, because she can see Captain America (!), or actually his modest alter ego, at the back of the lecture theatre talking urgently to himself, his hand against his ear as if listening to something. 

The MC of her lecture stream touches her arm, and she turns.  He takes over the mike: “Excuse me, ladies, gentlemen… if you would all please evacuate the building.  Please remain calm.”

“What’s going on?” she asks.

He covers the mike.  “Bomb threat, Amy.  Probably nothing but we have to get the building searched.”

Around them, the fire alarm is going off, and she covers her ears trying not to think of air raid sirens as _her_ audience bumble their way to their feet and mill around looking for the emergency exits.  Idiots.  She helps her supervisor pack up the test device they’d brought for show and tell and supports Prof Farley by the elbow as they head for the small door behind the lectern.  Behind it, yes, there in the service corridors, is one of her father’s specialists talking busily into a mike.  _Right, then._   She marches up to Agent Romanov.

“It’s not what you think,” Natasha says.

***

Steve walks into the incident room, and for a moment he’s in a Norman Rockwell painting, a scene of intense domesticity: an old woman and a younger one seated at a table showing off the workings of a machine to an earnestly interested Bruce; two men, also, intent on the monitors covering one wall, casually comfortable with each other, pointing out items of interest.  Then he blinks, and it’s all Ed Hopper and crushed colour tones, and the two groups hyper-aware of and also ignoring each other, with Bruce gamely holding down the neutral territory.

“Top two floors are clear,” he says.

Natasha walks in behind him, and he turns to nod at her and blinks, because he’s having a sudden vivid flash of Agent Romanov walking into a room and stripping out of her clothes, and he’s trying to work out why he feels like he’s watching the scene from two sets of eyes.  And why it seems so intensely unerotic and matter of fact.  He shakes his head for a moment, distracted.

The door bangs open, and Tony bustles in.  “There’s nothing.  I can’t find any trace of that radiation signature you thought you had, Bruce- hey!  What’s _she_ doing in here?”

Miss Coulson speaks without looking up from her machine.  “My professor is seventy and has a heart condition.  Making her stand outside in the rain wasn’t such a hot idea.”  She pauses.  “Oh hero, my hero,” she adds in a deadpan voice.  She pauses to help her professor fiddle with a pill bottle.

Tony scowls and joins the group checking out the monitors.

“Was that really necessary, Amelia?” Coulson asks mildly.

“Compared to all this…?” she waves her hands vaguely.  “This is a _science conference_.  I think you’re all a little bit confused about the kinds of things that go on here.  The biggest risks I’m worried about are being groped by one of the speakers and staving off alcohol poisoning at the post-grads’ knees up.  Not someone trying to take over the world or mess with the space-time continuum or... whatever else it is you guys do.  Because we’re actually all here just to _talk_ about stuff.  And get a bit drunk.  Like people do.  Normal people with normal lives.  Until you show up and everything turns into complete chaos.”

“There was a terrorist threat, honey.  We can’t ignore it.”

Amelia flushes.  “Doesn’t the state of _Italy_ have, like, its own police force?  Because your lot arriving always means a whole world of trouble.  And for what, exactly?”

“You’re over exaggerating, Amelia.”  Coulson had turned away from the monitors and his face was as bland as Steve had ever seen it.

“I remember the time you had your two goons waiting in my dorm room, for when I brought my date back.  No offence –” she glances quickly at Hawkeye and Black Widow.

“None taken,” Natasha shrugs.

“He was a security risk…”

“And then there was the time we were taking classes in a prefab for two semesters because you’d sent Big, Green and Muscly to smash up my university.  (Sorry),” she adds.

“It’s fine,” Bruce says.

“Saving the world, sweetheart.”

“And you stole my computer because you wanted some files on it!”

“We got you a new one,” Coulson puts in weakly.

“From Stark Industries.  What kind of tinpot crappy junk is that?”

“ _Hey_!” Tony Stark suddenly starts paying attention.  “If your hack of a daughter thinks she can disrespect my engineering division-”

“Hack? Strong words coming from the world’s biggest dilettante.  Liechmann Paradox, my left toe.”

“Amelia, we were doing the best we could,” Coulson puts in.  “Stark, if we could keep this at a professional level-”

“No.  _No._   Where does she get off insulting my w-”

“ _Tony_ ,” Steve interjects, “it’s fine.  Let it go.”

“Oh, it’s fine, alright.  Just so you know?  I had photos on that computer that I’m never going to get back.  So are we done?  There’s no actual bomb, yes?  Then it’s time for us to go.”  She gathers up her professor with the rigid air of someone who really wants to slam the door on her way out, but is too good mannered to, and _wants you to know it_.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So there's lots of Bad Science in this story, which may make a friend of mine who's an actual astronomer cry if he ever reads this. For the sake of pedantry:
> 
> Liechmann Paradox – there's no such thing; I made it up because I needed some technobabble. And Tony Stark is a jerk, right? The homeopathic ‘light has memory’ is also completely made up.  
> “people saw a guest star when SN 1054 went supernova” – this is actually real. The Crab nebula (M1) was formed by a star (SN 1054) becoming a supernova. The supernova was observed by Indian, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic astronomers in 1054, ‘guest star’ was the Chinese usage for a star that became temporarily visible.


	2. Chapter 2

The thing to do in Naples, Steve’s been told, is to be a tourist.  And it bugs him, because he was there in the War, and half the buildings he’d known are gone now, and the ones that aren’t have been tidily restored from their air raid dishevelment.  It gives him an uneasy juxtaposition between then and _now_ that messes with the way he remembers the place.  And when he’s off shift from the conference they’re guarding, he always ends up inexorably drifting to the green spaces of the city.

There was a big park near the University they were staying at… some kind of botanical garden he guesses.  And it’s green and quiet, and plants only ever look like themselves, and his fingers itch for his sketchbook.  And there’s that girl with the stud through her nose, looking dour, her hands jammed in her jacket pockets as she strides toward him.

“Ma’am,” he nods at her.

She looks up, surprised.  “Oh!  Captain Rogers.  I thought you’d all be back at the conference centre.”

“We’re taking turns to monitor things.  For now, I’ve got a couple hours.  Figured I’d get some fresh air.  You?”

She shrugs. “Right now they’re doing the block on geology and plate tectonics.  Really not my thing.  Rubbernecking for the win, right?”

“I’m finding it a bit daunting, actually.  Too much new stuff.  When I was here, half of it had just been bombed.”  Steve points up at a solid white blocky building.  “I remember that place, though, it was some kind of hostel, I think.  We were in Naples just after they threw out the Germans, and our troops had moved into the city, and… and there was an earthquake.  ‘Captain America’ went in to help get civilians out.  And then there was a dance in the courtyard a couple of days later.  I went – it was a good evening...” 

“Yeah, I know.”  She sighs.  “Dad’s a total fanboy about you.  And Mrs Hill used to tell me stories, some, too.  She really liked the dance, she said.”

They keep walking under the trees.  “Mrs Hill?”

“Uh huh.  Margaret Hill.  Dad’s first handler.”  She turns and looks at him curiously.  “Margaret Carter Devereaux Hill?  Mom and me used to visit her after she retired.  She had some pretty crazy stories about her career and all.  Some about Dad, too – I think he must have learnt how not to flap from her, because the way she and Mom told it, he was wild as anything back in the day.”  She makes a face.

The triple barrelled surname clicks through his head.  “Wait, _Peggy_ Carter?”

“You didn’t know?  I thought you would have looked them all up.”

“No, I… Fury said she’d passed on and… I didn’t look anyone up.”

She’s stopped walking and she’s frowning at him.  He tries to explain: “All that stuff, me and the War Bonds crowd and Peggy and the Howling Commandos… it’s all _personal_.  And what’s happening now, with Tony and Bruce and the team, that’s all personal, too.  But all the bits in between, it’s in history books and newspaper articles and film reels.  It’s not mine; it’s somebody else’s property.  It doesn’t feel like it’s real to me.  They’re not my memories.”

“Well, that’s a bummer.” 

Steve shrugs helplessly.

They walk on in silence for a time.

Finally, Amelia breathes in deeply through her nose.  “I always remember the way Mrs Hill smelled.  She always used this talcum powder, always the same kind.  Every time I go into a drug store, I can just go to this one section in the store, sniff the rose scented talc, and I’m there, back being eight years old again.”

Steve huffs a little.  “And she taught me how to knit,” Amelia goes on.  “Mom couldn’t, and Gran said I shouldn’t cause of Women’s Lib-“

“Heck,” Steve interrupts her, “ _I_ taught _Peggy_ how to knit.  She was always embarrassed because she hadn’t learned how.”

“Really?” Amelia pauses.  “Wow, she never told me.  Dad’ll freak.”

“Yeah…” Steve hunches his shoulders again.  “But about your father.  It’s kind of awkward.”

She rolls her eyes.  “Tell me about it.  ‘Oh no, sweetie, I can’t make it to your graduation – they found Captain America!’”

“Sorry…”

“Not your fault.”

For a few minutes, there is nothing to say, and then Amelia goes on, deliberately changing the subject.  “And I remember there was this song that Mrs Hill really loved.”  She hums a little.  “Dah dee dee….  Da di di di dee dee…”

“Yeah, I know that one,” he takes over the song: “ _In the mood – your ear will spot it…_ Di da da, di da da, da dee da da da.  Everyone loved that song, it was a big hit the whole war.  Huh.  They were playing it on Coney Island the night I… anyway.  And Bucky – that’s James Barnes, I mean, used to play it all the time.  It’s the song he taught himself to dance to when he only had one record.”

“I didn’t know that.”  Miss Coulson, finally, was starting to smile.  “Mrs Hill used to talk about Bucky, though.  She liked him, but not as much as you  – too cocky by half and knew it, she reckoned.  I’m sorry – it can’t feel like that long ago since you lost him.”

He shrugs.  “It was the War.  There were a lot of crazy things going on.  Particularly with Peggy, actually.  I never really knew what she did a lot of the time, she’d just blow in back to the SSR with some missing airmen we thought were about to be executed, or a battalion would have mysteriously disabled all their guns and deserted.  The Colonel always said not to ask too many questions.”

“Yeah, that sounds like her.  Course, if you scratched her, you’d find out she was secretly just as much of a peacenik as Mom.  She was all about helping with the reconstruction in France, and the rebuild of Japan, which was brutal, she says, but had some outcomes she liked in the end.  She always had the shits for Stark Industries, of course.”

“How come?”

“Howard Stark was one of the bigwigs in the Manhattan Project.  You know?  Hiroshima?  Nagasaki where the women don’t wicky wacky woo?  The atom bomb.”

He realises that his jaw has dropped.

“And you know, so was Richard Feynman, who’s someone _I_ get all fan girly about, which is, you know, a bit problematic.  He said a long time later that when he joined the project he had all these really great, noble reasons, and how nobody had a clue how the War was going to go and all that.  But by the end, it was just a puzzle to him.  It was something difficult that he and his team were trying to get done because they could.  And then it was out in the world and there were shadows on the walls and little kids with radiation poisoning.  And I have to think about that, because of what I do.  I can’t just call my work an intellectual problem and not wonder about what happens when it goes out in the world.”  She shrugs and kicks some leaves.  “Own my own choices, I guess?  Oh well.  Can’t go wrong with a telescope right?  And _holiday snapshots._ ”

Then she sighs and points to a group of people gathering at the gate of the park.  “I think you’re up.”

***

“This conference blows,” Stark says, “I don't think there's going to be anything worth my time.”

“We are responding to a credible terrorist threat,” Coulson says calmly.

“Which could have been dealt with by local law enforcement.  Is this about Baby Coulson?  Did you drag us all here so you could get a look at your daughter?  Cause the rest of us just pick up a phone.”

Steve watches Romanov and Hawkeye walk up to the group, and he shakes his head, because they’re _filthy_ , and there are red streaks around their hairlines as if they’d washed their faces but not their hair, and their eyes are dread incarnate.  “It’s not what you think,” Natasha says. 

And then he sees them back in the civvies he saw them in that morning, perfectly clean.

“Whoa there, nellie.  Hot flush!”  Tony Stark leers impersonally at the pair of assassins.

“You’re an idiot,” Bruce says, but there is affection in his voice.  He scrubs his hands through his hair and peers at Steve.  “Oh good, you’re back.  We got another read on that weird radiation.”

“Phantom blip, more like,” Tony interrupts.  “We seek it here, we seek it there, we seek it everywhere!”  He makes woo-woo fingers in Steve’s face.  “But is it anywhere at all?  Do you see?”

Agent Coulson looks up from the portable monitors.  “We received another threat, also.  It’s definitely coming from someone inside the conference, but my agents haven’t pinpointed the source yet.  Captain Rogers – I want you, Barton and Romanov to fan out through the area and look for-”

“Hinky stuff!” Hawkeye high fives his partner.

“…suspicious activity.”

“Sure,” Steve nods, fumbles in his pocket for his earpiece, and turns to say good bye to Miss Coulson where she’d been hanging, diffidently, at the edges of the group.  She isn’t there, and he turns wider, scanning the street until he spots her walking purposefully into the big white building he’d pointed out to her.  The Albergo something, he suddenly remembers.  “Just a minute, I want to check something first.”

***

“Professor Farley!” Amelia puffs as she makes it the top of the stairs, chasing down the face she’d glimpsed in the window.  “What are you doing up here?  Your heart!”

“Oh, it’s fine, dear.  Just business.”

Amelia gazes around the room.  It’s… old.  Old plaster, and grubby wooden floors, and a small gable window looking out onto the street.  It’s festooned with equipment, pieces that Amelia had helped build, others she’s never seen before, all strung together with jury-rigged wires.  “What’s going on?  The Avengers are outside right now – they’re back chasing the mystery bomb threat.”

“Oh, I know that, dear.”  The professor was adjusting one of their test devices, the small one they’d brought to demonstrate to Farley’s colleagues.  “I wanted them here.”

Outside the windows, Amelia can hear the sound of sirens wailing.  When she looks outside, dark clouds are gathering over the city, and there are ominous shapes dipping out of the clouds.

“Are you alright, Miss Coulson?”  She turns, startled at the voice behind her.

“ _No_ ,” Farley says, looking at Captain America with dislike.  “I wanted _Thor_.  Thor’s the one I need.  Be a good lad and send him up.”

“I can’t do that,” Steve says.

“Oh, enough of your pesky little morals.  You’ll do what I say, _or else._ ”  The professor kept on fiddling with her device, adjusting settings.

“Or else what?” Amelia asks.

“I do _this_.”  She points the operating prong at Captain America.

… and he gasps as a burning spike rams through his chest … and his heart sputters as its power plant is replaced … and he’s in a blue haze as he starts shooting civilians and _likes_ it… and the green rage rises from the tight knot in his belly and he _smashes_ … and there’s snow in Moscow, so cold she thinks she’ll lose her feet, and blood on the snow… and there’s _ice_ , and a tumbling dive into the sea, and he holds on to _that_ one, because he knows it’s real, it _happened_ , and he can remember the feel of frigid salt water draining into his lungs and he gasps…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Steve points up at a solid white blocky building. “I remember that place, it was some kind of hostel, I think.” – the Albergo Reale dei Poveri, originally built in the 18th century as a hostel for the poor, various other uses in the 20th century. According to Wikipedia, which Is Your Friend, it was damaged in an earthquake in November, 1943. (A local uprising ejected the German occupiers in Naples in September of that year, Allied troops were present from October, Steve had his first moment of bad assness in November.) The park they’re in is the Orto botanico di Napoli, a research botanical garden owned by the University of Naples Federico II. Eh, still making stuff up, but trying to be in the realm of the possible, apologies if I messed up on my real world facts.  
> “I taught Peggy how to knit” – I just made this up again. On the other hand, my Gran once told me about her brother in law who made his own underwear and helped her make up her Best. Skirt. Ever, so I think it’s reasonable that Steve might have known how. Useful for mending socks and the like.  
> “I never really knew what [Peggy] did a lot of the time” – it’s not actually clear from the Captain America movie; she’s just there keeping Colonel Philips company. I choose to believe that she was badass like the real life Krystyna Skarbek who had a Jedi mind control power and did heroic cross country skiing trips in the dead of winter.  
> “Back in Nagasaki, where the fellers chew tobaccy/ And the women wicky wacky woo.” Lyrics from a jazz song “Nagasaki” popular from the late 20s to the 40s. (Also one of the songs that Hugh Laurie sings in Jeeves and Wooster.)  
> Richard Feynman - from “Los Alamo from Below” “You see, what happened to me - what happened to the rest of us - is we started for a good reason, then you're working very hard to accomplish something and it's a pleasure, it's excitement. And you stop thinking, you know; you just stop. So Bob Wilson was the only one who was still thinking about it, at that moment.”


	3. Chapter 3

Amelia’s kneeling over him, looking green.  “Don’t be dead,’kay?” she says in a small voice.

He rolls over onto his side and starts coughing, hawking out the contents of his lungs.  She hands him a handkerchief, clean and ironed, embroidered with flowers and smelling of roses, a sudden reminder of how people _used_ to do things.  “What happened?” he asks.

“I thought you were having a heart attack.  You just started spasming and choking.”

“I…  It’s the machine.  It made me think I was everyone else.  Everyone else in the worst moment of their life.”  He spits, feeling embarrassed, and wipes his mouth on the handkerchief.

“Yes, exactly!” Farley adds, helpfully.  “You give me your memories, I mix them up, all bright and shiny, and then I build a bridge… a rainbow bridge.  Now, where’s Thor?  I _need_ him.”

“Can’t,” he gasps, “help you.”

“You’re not going to be tedious and make me threaten your friend, are you?”

“Hey!”

“Still can’t help you.  Thor – not here.”

_“How’s it hanging, Cap?  We could really use your help out here – Hulk’s gone a bit… thingy.”_

Steve adjusts his earpiece.  “Sorry, Tony.  Got some stuff to sort out.”  Outside, he can hear a muffled roar and sirens starting to wail in the distance.  When he looks up, Amelia’s professor is pointing a gun at her:

“Hey now,” she’s saying, as she gets off the floor, “you know me.  I’ve been doing your paperwork for three years now.  I thought we were friends-”

“And you’re very good at filling out grant applications, dear, good eye for detail.  But now it’s time for Science!”

“About that.”  Amelia was slowly, ever so slowly edging away from Steve.  “You’ve met my Dad the civil servant.”  There was a brief, but pointed, scuffle which ended with Farley on her knees and Amelia holding the gun.  “You know he’s not _that_ _kind_ of civil servant.”

“You’re too late,” Farley says with slitted eyelids.  “It’s running now.  Send Thor to me.”

“ _Why?_ ”

“I need his dreams,” she smiles happily.  “I need him to dream the rainbow bridge for me.”

Steve interrupts: “Thor is in Equador right now.  There’s a weather anomaly his lady was investigating…”

“Huh.”  The Professor sits back hard on her heels.  “Unfortunate.  Oh well, it will go somewhere else then.”

“Professor…” Amelia walks over to look more closely at the machine.  “What have you done?”

“I always wanted to walk among the stars,” Dr Farley says.  “Einstein was a dope putting limits on the world, telling us how we’re supposed to think.”  She spits.  “You can’t put speed limits on the universe!”

"No... No, no, _no_."  Amelia had plugged a miniature laptop into the machine and was typing furiously.  "This should not be happening."

Steve looks at her sharply.  “What’s wrong, Miss Coulson?”

“It’s the photamnesometer.  There’s no way it should be able to do that.  If it doesn’t slow down soon it’s going to rotate itself into an Aspernach anomaly.  The prof’s got some kind of weird attachment on it which is drawing in energy – I don’t even know how to turn it off…”

“What can I do to help?”

“Just… ” she shakes her head helplessly.  “Shit.  I need to talk to Stark-ego.  You got a phone number for him?”

As he’s fumbling in his pocket for his address book, a sudden wave of intense… _feeling_ floods the room.  “Oh!” Amelia suddenly steps back and sits down.  A vivid crimson blush was spreading across her face.  “Be, um, a little careful about touching the central unit.”

The room starts to shake, and he dives over Amelia as plaster rains down upon them, and he hears a heavy thump of a beam falling.  When the shaking stops, he looks around him in sudden memory – he’d been here before in 1943.  “Was that the Hulk?” Amelia asks, crawling out from under him.

“No.  I don’t think it could be.  I remember being in this room and pulling a kid out from under that beam, from that exact beam – I can even see the blood spatter.  Have we gone back in time?”

“Of course not, dear.  Logically impossible.  Time is coming forward to _us._ ”  Dr Farley was sitting with her back against a wall, looking grey.

Steve turns to her: "Are you injured?” he asks, taking her hand.

“Heart condition," she answers.  "How dreadfully inconvenient."  She was gasping slightly and her pulse was thready.  "I remember you, you know, from before.  You blew up my lab.”

“I'm sorry?”

“ _Scheiße_.  Haven't thought in German in a long time, either.  Schmidt _hated_ you.”  She sucks in a little breath then.  “But I was only ever in it for the Science...”

"You're German?"

"I'm not seventy, either.  We all do what we must," gasp, "to blend in."

Steve takes his jacket off and tucks it in around the old woman.  "You’re a good dear.  But it’s so terribly ironic,” she says.  “I spent my whole life trying to solve my own paradox, and run out of time just when I've cracked it.  Life's a bother like that.”  She pats his hand conspiratorially.  “Remember that, young man, always take your chances when you’ve got them.”

Behind him, he hears Amelia keep up a running conversation with Tony:  " _Leichmann Paradox,_ " Stark's voice crackles over the phone's speaker.

“ _Not_ the Leichmann.  If it were, the mnesom unit would be dopplering blue, whereas it's actually a delicate shell-like pink.  Did you even _look_ at the photo?”

 _“Way I see it, you've got two choices, honeybun.  You could put it in a lead lined chamber and let it decompress the mneso- phtago- … crap, the whatchamacallit field over time._ ”

“Time we don't have-“

“ _Or you could just smash it._ ”

“I spent three years of my life building this thing!”

“ _You can always build it again.  Heck, I always redo my prototypes.  I don’t know what I want until I’ve made it go…”_

“Yeah, that’s typical of an engineer.  Hit it with a spanner until it looks kinda vaguely like it’s working.  You ever tried designing something right the first time?”

“ _You want my help or not, spring onion?_ ”

Professor Farley smiles wearily.  “The energy of youth.  So invigorating.  If only we’d had more time back when I was twenty three, Herr Captain Rogers…”

“Don’t think about that right now,” Steve says, chafing her papery wrists.  “Can you help us turn it off?”

“Whyever would I do that?” she asks slyly.  “It’s Science.”

“Captain Rogers?”  Amelia was looking at him solemnly.  “Can you tell me what’s going on outside?”

Through the window, he can see bombers stooping low out of the clouds, lightning lancing downwards.  He tells her, and she sits back for a long moment.  Finally, she glances at her professor and sighs.  “Hey Stark!”

“ _My little cabbage!_ ”

“Can you get up into the ionosphere and set off a big booming radio pulse?  Get it oscillating in sync?  That should set up a buffer layer and give us a bit more time, right?”

“ _That’s stup-_ ” A silence. _“Yeah, that might work.  On it.  But get a move on at your end._ ”

“If you wanted Thor,” Steve asks, “why all the rest of us?”

“Power,” Farley smiles sweetly.  “All those fascinating adventures of yours that they tell us about on the television.  Such intense vivid memories.  All _power_ for someone who knows to use them.  And I do.  Thor was just the end phase, to give me the right coordinates.  To Asgard, and the rainbow bridge, the shimmering path…  But we’ll just go somewhere else, instead.”

“ _Sweetcakes,_ my _big memory of Space the Final Frontier is asphyxiating somewhere in Chitauri local space.  Your professor maybe didn't think too hard about the bridge she was trying to open_.”

“ _Captain Rogers_ ," Coulson's quiet voice came over his earpiece.  " _Can you give me a status report?_ ”

 _“His status is that Spawn of Coulson's science project is about to open a gate to the bad guys’ front yard._ ”

“I built a _really cool telescope_.  All this other stuff I’ve never even seen before.  Don't lay that on me.”

She turns her phone off and throws it on the floor.  “God _dammit!_ ”

And if there’s one thing Steve knows, in this time or the other one, it’s the sounds of someone wigging out, and not necessarily at their first battle.  He lets the professor’s hands fall and kneels next to the girl.  “Amelia,” he says calmly, “what did Peggy always used to say about Ginger Rogers?”

She looks up at him in surprise.  “She did everything Fred Astaire did, but in high heels and backward.”

“That’s right.  Now what do you need?”

Her hands are flicking over the machine, a small tool in her hand.  She was moving over it, turning first one screw, then another, flinching away from each touch, as she lifted plates and wires away, but working her way into the depths of the machine.  “It’s…” she scrubs her face.  “I need to get at the mnesom unit and crack it, but every time I get near it, it’s like I’m you guys.  I don’t remember who I am.”

“Alright.  So.  Peggy taught you to knit.  What’s the first thing you made with her?”

“A peggy square.”  She stops and giggles, only a little hysterically.

“So you have to cast on.  What colour is your yarn?”

“…red.”  She sniffs hugely, and he passes over his own handkerchief, plain white, but clean and smelling of the iron, for her to blow her nose on.

And then there’s a _groinch_ and he’s clutching a grenade to his belly, thinking _This is it – and I haven’t even seen the Front…_   When he looks up, the fallen beam is gone, and the plastered walls look new, and they’re in some kind of dormitory, with hungry eyed boys sitting up on pallets, looking at them curiously.  There’s a sharp retort-

“It’s not what you think,” Amelia says distinctly, but when she lifts her hand from her side, her fingers are red.”

“Tell Schmidt I regret nothing.” Professor Farley was standing over her student, a gun held loosely in her fingers.  Then it falls, and so does the professor, and Steve can’t bring himself to care about what happens to her.

The radio crackles: “ _What the_ fuck _have you done with my daughter, Rogers?”_

“This isn’t the time,” he says, and rips his earpiece out.

For someone who’s been shot, there were worse places it could have been, and he thinks she’ll be OK in the end.  But she’s pale and shocky, and she winces when he cinches his belt tight over the holes in her, padded with her rose-and-flowers handkerchief and his own plain white one.

“What’s a mnesom unit?”

“Pink golfball in the middle,” she says, very quietly.  “But we’re running out of time.”

The machine is open, exposed.  Vulnerable.  Captain America swallows hard and plunges his hand into its depths.

… and the stars are so incredibly bright, and he breathes out, the mist on his faceplate

… and it's time for her first kill shot, and she breathes out, long and slow, like the Soldier said, and the red blossoms on her mark’s chest and he falls in the mud.  Her trainer hums under his breath as they drag the body out of sight: _Da di di di dee dee_

… and the mud seeps through a hole in his boot, the smell rank and moist.  Peggy turns to him: “There’s been an accident”

… and there's a muddy field, and the chorus girls and roustabouts are blowing off steam to a record with a driving beat played over the loudspeakers …

_Mr. What-ya-call-em what you doin’ tonight  
Hope you're in the mood because I'm feeling just right_

… and he's in a garage with a portable phonograph stumbling through the steps with Bucky so that his friend can impress his hot date

… and she’s in a sterile waiting room, and she’s not allowed to see her father because _family_ _don’t have security clearance_

_There's no chance romancin' with a blue attitude  
You got to do some dancin' to get in the mood_

… and they’ve cleared the courtyard of war detritus and invited the nurses along and some of the soldiers in the logistics train have made shift to form a band, and there's Peggy coming over to him in a corner with a bottle of beer teasing him about not dancing, and he's shaking his head and loving the way she smells of roses and talcum powder… and he’s on a tightrope doing his act and he fucking hates those goddamn piss-smelling clowns… and he feels the radiation burn… the salt water in his lungs… he’s leaping high over the desert, the thin clear air… the clouds are gold-yellow, blood-red, and beautiful

_the trumpets scream_

… and she's in a living room with an old lady who's swinging her around to the music, and the rose scented talcum powder and the sunlight in her hair… and the cave in Afghanistan is cold… and she’s kissing him and stabbing him because that’s what she does and what does love have to do with anything?  Desire?  Death?... and the yarn slides through his fingers… and the garrotte slides through his fingers… and the yarn slides through her fingers

… and Dr Erskine is poking him hard in the chest

_In the mood - that's it I got it_

… and there's wires in his chest and electricity keeping him alive

_In the mood - your ear will spot it_

… and there's a blade in his chest and he’s got his hands tangled in her hair, in the rain

_In the mood - oh what a hot hit_

… and there's butterflies in his chest and he's gasping and wheezing and he doesn't want to stop as he spins

_Be alive and get the jive  
You've got to learn how_

… and letting Bucky lead, always leading

_and the trumpet’s in a crescendo_

and spinning and spinning and the smell of roses…

His hand clenches on the golfball and he _squeezes_ , and he feels the bright pain of the shards digging into his hand, and the bright pain of memories fracturing in and of and beyond him, and he _yells_ for all the things he’s lost, and what he’ll never get back.  Professor Farley is slumped against the wall, her eyes unseeing, dead, and he _curses_ her.

Amelia is lying on the ground next to him, pale as ice, one hand fallen as if from the machine, the other holding her phone, the tinny blare of _In The Mood_ cycling around again.  He checks that she’s breathing, and sits down with his head between his knees for long minutes.  Then, because he is a soldier and has a job to do, he gets himself off the floor, picks up the girl, and starts walking down the stairs.

Halfway down, he feels her twitch and wake up, and for a moment he thinks that she’s going to vomit.  She manages with a discreet burp and looks around carefully.  "Oh man, this is embarrassing."  Then, sleepily - "could be worse, I guess..."  She tucks her head under his chin and keeps her eyes squeezed shut, like a child, and mumbles some more:  "Who doesn't want to be hugged by Captain America?”

At the bottom of the stairs, Coulson is waiting for them, blood running down his face, gunsmoke floating in the air behind him: a manic grin on his face and mayhem behind him.  “That’s my little girl,” he says.

***

And then there’s the outside world and Coping and directing clean up from the Hulk’s latest tantrum and the bombs and the earthquake, and he’s used to the routine.  But even so, when they’re all done he lets the Avengers go home without him.  The thing to do in Naples, he’s been told, is to be a tourist, and for that he’s got some time.

When he gets back to their offices in New York, there’s a cigar box waiting for him.  A little battered, but whole, and the scent of old tobacco rising from it.  He opens the note: “Some memories for you.  Best, Amelia”, and he opens the box to find photos – a very young Coulson in a dress uniform with a terrible haircut and an older woman standing next to him holding a medal; the lady knitting; Coulson again, his face nakedly open helping her hold a baby; a little girl in a bathing suit running under a hose held by the same woman; a big anniversary photo with a frail matriarch surrounded by hordes of relatives; the old lady dancing with the girl in a living room.  He traces her smile with his thumb.  There’s more in the box: an old black and white poster of a kid with huge eyes and a cow lick printed with Japanese text and what looks like calligraphy in black ink on the back; a gold pendant; a poster from his show carefully folded and wrapped in tissue paper; a painted feather; a peggy square in red yarn…

He walks into the break room, and there’s Coulson, leaning back in his chair, watching the antics of his crew fighting over the last doughnut.  There’s a half smile on the handler’s face, and Steve fumbles with his phone until he’s worked out how to take a photograph, and he fumbles some more until he’s worked out how to mail it.  There are some memories he can stand to share as well.  He’ll dig out his sketchbook later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “You can’t put speed limits on the universe!” – well… actually, that’s what the Theory of Relativity is, but screw it, this is fiction. Also, lots of completely bogus science in this whole chapter. Cry, people who actually know what they’re talking about!
> 
> Ginger Rogers – according to Wikipedia, the actress who plays Peggy Carter used that line about Ginger Rogers as part of how she felt about the character.
> 
> “In the Mood” – one of the big hits of the late 30s and early 40s (and it’s still cool now! ;-) ). There are several sets of lyrics to this song (and some instrumental only versions.) I’m using the lyrics to the Andrews Sisters version (http://www.lyricstime.com/the-andrews-sisters-in-the-mood-lyrics.html) which is cheating the dates (their recording of the song was in 1952) but I like their version better.
> 
> “an old black and white poster of a kid with huge eyes and a cow lick printed with Japanese text.” Astro Boy. The original character’s name in Japanese, Tetsuwan Atomu, literally translates to Iron Arm Atom. The Astro Boy manga was first published in post WWII Japan by Osamu Tezuka and was a powerful influence on the genre. Maybe Peggy Carter got to meet him? According to this show I went to see about Tezuka, Astro Boy got beaten up a whole lot, and kept being nice about it and trying to save people. So he’s got a bit in common with Our Steve, I think.

**Author's Note:**

> And a big big thank you to Thimblerig for heroic beta reading. This is definitely one of those stories where you start writing and work out what the plot is later, and she’s been cheer leading the whole way and also remarkably stoic about getting tiny fragments and helping me fit them together so they make sense. Hooray!


End file.
